Useful Pages

Monday, November 29, 2010

Wouldn't it be nice if all the on-line shopping tools were available on one easy-to-use page? All the price comparison sites, product reviews, classifieds, etc in one place? FaganFinder.com has put together a wonderful collection of product-related search engines. The 70 web sites are arranged under the categories of Price Comparison Searches, Retail Companies (only 4, thank goodness), Marketplaces and Auctions, Handmade Goods, Product Reviews, Products in Local Stores, Local Classifieds, Product Manuals, Product Code Searches, Green Shopping, and Renting and Borrowing. Included of course are several sites facilitating giving stuff away. (Thanks to Phil Bradley for the tip.)--RL

Cookstr (www.cookstr.com) has recipes by well-known chefs and authors from accalimed cookbooks. You may sign up for a weekly newsletter with 10 recipes.

Episurious (www.epicurious.com) was one of the first food sites. It has recipes from Bon Appetit and Gourmet. It includes cooking videos and information on wine pairings.

Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org) encourages visitors to "eat local and buy local." The site links to the Meatrix http://www.themeatrix.com/which explains the difference between factory farms and locally raised meat. Also included is an "Eat Well Guide" for finding local, organic food. Resources for teachers are also included.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Last year the Interlibrary Loan Department tweeted the Top 10 Libraries that we borrow material from and the Top 10 Libraries that we lend material to. You can find that on the official Wellesley Free Library Twitter feed.

This time around we thought we'd list the Top 10's on the blog for your reading pleasure.

Top 10 Libraries Lending Us Materials

Boston College

UMASS Amherst

Brandeis University

Wellesley College

Tufts University

Northeastern University

Smith College

Williams College

Amherst College

Mount Holyoke College

Top 10 Libraries Borrowing Materials From Us

Quincy Public Library (on behalf of the former Central, Western, and Southern regions)

Stonehill College

UMASS Boston

Mid-Continent Public Library (Missouri)

Tufts University

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Boston College

Boston Public Library

Simmons College

UMASS Amherst

If you followed this last year you'll notice that there are some changes to the list. Brandeis University, Harvard University, Holy Cross, and Denver Public have all fallen off the above list of top 10 libraries borrowing material from us. They still borrow materials from us but not enough to warrant a place in the top 10.

Both lists also show that most of the items borrowed for patrons here and lent to patrons elsewhere are loans between Massachusetts libraries outside of the Minuteman Library Network. Most of those loans are also between libraries that use the state funded library delivery system.

Lord of Misrule--Jaimy GordonLord of Misrule is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong.

Nonfiction Winner

Just Kids--Patti SmithIn this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Poetry

Lighthead--Terrance HayesFrom an award-winning poet, a new collection in which the political and the personal converge in innovative and beautiful ways.

Young People's Literature

Mockingbird--Kathryn ErskineTen-year-old Caitlin, who has Asperger's Syndrome, struggles to understand emotions, show empathy, and make friends at school, while at home she seeks closure by working on a project with her father.

The Wellesley Free Library Trustees are offering you this one time opportunity to return all past due Wellesley Free Library items with no fine this weekend--Thursday, November 18 through Sunday, November 21.

You may return the past due items to any Wellesley Library location with our appreciation and No Fine!

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Each month the WFL features a new online resource available to library cardholders. Credo Reference is November’s resource that features searchable online content from over 500 reference books in a broad range of subjects.

The topic page resulting from your subject search presents and organizes relevant results from these 500 plus resources, images, videos, Google Books, as well as relevant results from Wellesley’s other library resources including books, ebooks, ejournals, databases and more.

A Concept Map offers related and subtopics for a more directed search and narrowing a research paper topic.

Use your library card from home and try it out on our webpage OR the library catalogtoday! Then call 781-235-1610 or sign up for Introducing the New Credo Reference Online Resource class on December 7 from 2-3 p.m. SH

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

For the first time,Library Journal has selected the Top 10 Best Books from Fiction and Nonfiction publications for 2010. If you are looking for a great read during the holidays or to purchase for family and friends, try one of these!

American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen --"Terroir" is French for taste of place. In this book, a James Beard Award-winning author explores many of the North American foods that depend on place for their unique flavor, including salmon from Alaska's Yukon River and honey from the tupelo-lined banks of the Apalachicola River. (641.013 Jacobsen)

By Nightfallby Michael Cunningham--Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy until her much-younger look-alike brother shows up for a visit. Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, Cunningham's masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. (Fiction Cunningham M.)

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen--From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections comes a darkly comedic novel about family. Franzen's intensely realized characters struggle to learn how to live in an ever-confusing world--one with the temptations and burdens of liberty, the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire. (Fiction Franzen J.)

Room by Emma Donoghue--Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, "Room" is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (Fiction Donoghue, E.)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Crown)--Skloot brilliantly weaves together the story of Henrietta Lacks--a woman whose cells have been unwittingly used for scientific research since the 1950s--with the birth of bioethics, and the dark history of experimentation on African Americans. (616.02774 Skloot)

The Passage by Justin Cronin--In just 32 minutes, a military experiment gone wrong would unleash a virus that would change the world forever as man fears darkness, death, or a life of the undead. A whole new approach to a post-apocalyptic world which taps into the frenzy of vampirism found in fiction. (Fiction Cronin, J.)

The Tiger by John Vaillant--A haunting, gripping exploration of predators and prey, and an intimate portrait of a remarkable animal increasingly threatened by interaction with humans, this work recreates the hunt for a man-eating tiger across the forbidding landscape of Russia's Far East. (599.756 Vaillant)

Walker Evans: Decade by Decade text by James Crump--Walker Evans is best known for his Depression era photos and his collaboration with James Agee to publish Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which portrays three white tenant farmers in Southern Alabama during the depression.This book presents all of Mr. Evans photos, mainly rarely seen.(779 Crump)SH

OR NOT...Believe it or not, there are people who use search engines other than Google! I mean don't they know that Google is a verb? While I admit I don't have the patience to compare the results of Google to other engines, I know that whenever I switch to say Bing, I've been perfectly satisfied with my results. And when I want to see my results in categories, Clusty (now called Yippy) does a great job. And when I need only quality sites, directories (like ipl2)work for me. And when I'm not getting what I want with what I think are good search words, sometimes using a meta-search engine works well. And when...well, you get the picture. The bottom line is, as I see it, for general web searches, you probably can't beat the Big Three (in the US): Google, Yahoo and Bing. For more focused research, you might save time by using a search engine fitted to your needs. Look at Phil Bradley's list to broaden your search horizons. Or noodletools, which has a nice what-search-engine-to-use-when page. Let us know if you find any good ones to recommend.RL

Monday, November 8, 2010

Publisher's Weekly's current issue shares their editor's choice for best books of the year including cookbooks. Several of of their picks are in our collection for you to peruse and enjoy.Mark Bittman's The Food Matters Cookbook